Page 12 of Blood Orange Christmas
“We don’t want trouble,” the tall man says, and I can hear that he believes this. The young one does not.
“Trouble,” the young one repeats, smiling. “Do you still sell that word as if it is bread? You bring trouble everywhere you go, Accardi. You just buy better plates.”
Dante lifts one shoulder a fraction. “You made a mistake,” he says. “You touched something that belongs to me.”
I want to hate the word. It lands in my gut like heat.
The young one pretends to consider. “Belongs,” he says, savors it. He flicks his gaze to me. “Does she agree?”
“No one asked me,” I say. My voice sounds like it belongs to someone else. His smile widens.
“See?” he says. “This is where we are different. We ask.”
“You stole,” Dante says flatly.
“Borrowed,” the young man counters. “To talk. To introduce ourselves. Old manners. Your father had them. You do not.”
Dante steps forward one pace and the air thins. “My father is dead because he confused tradition with safety,” he says. “I don’t make that mistake.”
The young man’s mouth tightens and then smooths. “You should have come alone,” he says softly. “You brought wolves.”
“I brought a clock,” Dante says, calm like a closed door. “And it already ran out.”
For a second, no one moves. The young man reaches two fingers into his jacket, slow. Harrison doesn’t look at him. He looks at the garage door chain. The light-coat man by the elevator exhales. I smell something sharp, not chlorine, but like it. I understand I am about to be in a room that changes shape.
Dante takes a small object from his pocket and turns it in his hand. It clicks, once, barely audible. The chain on the roll-up door loosens like a muscle relaxing. Someone out of my sight has done something with a cutter and a wedge and timing. The door rises smoother than it should. The green light floods in. A second engine that I didn’t register over the first coughs and settles. The young man’s head turns two degrees toward the noise. It is two degrees too far.
Harrison moves like water. The tall man beside me reaches to pull me back and then inhales in surprise, which is when I realize Harrison didn’t touch him. He touched the chain, and the chain touched the tall man’s wrist hard enough to be a lesson. The short one curses and goes for his inner jacket and the light-coat near the stair is simply there, pressing the short man’s forearm against the wall with one hand and the flat of the other against his throat without making a scene of it. The young man flicks his eyes to Dante again, but there is nothing casual in them now.
“We came to talk,” he says.
“You came to make me choose a public place,” Dante replies, still not raising his voice. “You chose one with only two exits and no cameras. You thought that would make me careful. You thought careful meant weak.”
The young man swallows something back. “You won’t shoot me here.”
Dante’s eyes lift to the roll-up door. The second engine revs once, then kills again. The message is clear. They can, but they won’t need to.
“No,” Dante says and takes another step. “I don’t need to.”
His hand moves. I don’t see a gun. I don’t see a knife. I see the young man’s certainty break. The collar of the expensive suit is suddenly wrong, twisted, the amber cufflinks flash where they shouldn’t, and he’s against the van with his breath gone. Dante doesn’t touch him again. He just stands very close and lets the silence get tall.
“Return what you took,” Dante says and flicks his gaze to me. “Now.”
Nobody argues. The tall man’s mouth works. He steps away, hands up, and I feel the space open where he’d been holding my arm. The short man stops fighting the wall and uses his eyes like he’s already somewhere else. A moment later, Harrison has taken my elbow with the gentleness of an ER nurse and I’m moving toward the door that’s open now, toward the green light and the air I can’t pull into my lungs fast enough.
“Walk,” Harrison murmurs, and I do. We pass the chain coiled like a snake on the floor. We pass the man at the elevator, who might be smiling or not. We go through the spill of light and into the lower level of a car park where a black sedan waits with its doors already open. It’s quiet, quiet in the way expensive things are. I slide into the back and the leather is cold. Harrison closes me in and the world outside muffles. Through the glass, I see Dante still inside the garage, his body turned so we only see his profile. He isn’t looking at me. He’s finishing something.
A minute passes. Two. He comes out at a pace that says there is no need to hurry. He gets in beside me and the car moves before the door shuts.
“Are you hurt?” he asks.
“No.”
He looks at my wrists. There is a thin red line where the tie bit. He reaches for my hands and I don’t pull away. He turns them over, thumbs moving in a circle like he’s smoothing something that can’t be smoothed.
“Who were they?” I ask.
“Rinaldi’s young cousin,” he says. “He wants to be seen.”
